Thursday, 27 March 2008

I've never been much of a podcast listener, largely because I haven't gotten
my act together and downloaded any on a regular basis, and partly because
the iPod is tied to Sarah's iTunes on her laptop, so it's not convenient to
go fiddling with the iPod. If I ever manage to get back into the swing of
things and get to the gym regularly, I think I'd prefer to listen to a
podcast rather than straight music, so I can hopefully expand my brain while
I'm slogging my guts out on the treadmill.

Kynan and Shona have both talked about
LugRadio events from when they lived in the UK, and I've been vaguely aware
of it as a podcast (it's probably the first podcast I'd name if you asked me
to name one). I vaguely knew that Kynan had been trying to organise
something LugRadio related in the Valley for a while now.

So I got all excited when I went and looked at the schedule and discovered
it was going to be something vaguely like a mini-linux.conf.au, I scurried off and bought a
couple of tickets. Then Sarah pointed out that it's the weekend that we're
going to San Diego for a four-day weekend. Oh well, at least the tickets
were pretty cheap.

So, if, unlike me, you'll actually be in the Bay Area on April 12th
and 13th, check it out, it sounds like it'll be fun.

I switched from Pine to Mutt as my primary email client around the
time I decided to become a Debian developer, because Pine's PGP support was
abysmal (it also beat building Pine packages by hand all the time).

The other bonus feature was it threaded emails, which made it easier to
follow mailing lists.

It's been a very gradual learning process since I switched, and I certainly
don't consider myself to be a Mutt power user. I initially really hated it,
I think largely because of the concept of "old, unseen" messages, versus
"new" messages, and the behaviour of the Tab key. Once I unset the
mark_old variable, it got a lot more tolerable. I think at some
point I either plagiarised someone's .muttrc from the Internet, or
sat down with the manual (or possibly a bit of both) and came up with a
config that I could live with, and it's been workable ever since.

One problem I (more recently) started having was that when I had 200-odd
unread emails in my inbox, which has been pretty common occurrence in the
last couple of years, and someone replied to an email in an old thread,
because I wasn't necessary scrolling through all 200-odd emails (as new,
unthreaded emails usually sorted chronologically at the bottom of my inbox),
I'd miss the fact that the email had arrived, often for extended periods of
time.

I was lamenting this problem to Sarah over dinner last night, and saying how
I preferred Gmail's behaviour, where the position of a thread in the inbox
was determined by the date of the most recent email in the thread.

I figured Mutt must have a sort option to be able to deal with
this, and so I went rummaging in the manual last night, and discovered the
sort_aux
configuration variable. I've set that to last-date-received, and
now I'm very pleased. I should never miss an email again. Of course, I
should really try practising Inbox Zero,
then it wouldn't be an issue.

Thursday, 13 March 2008

So my flight from SFO to AKL was nice and uneventful. I even managed to
sleep for about 6 hours. The flight landed about 30 minutes early in
Auckland, but alas, the connecting flight had some sort of "engineering"
problems, and was delayed from a 6:30am departure, past 7:30am, and then the
next thing I knew they were handing out bits of paper saying the flight
wouldn't be departing until 10pm and we were all getting shuttled off to a
hotel for the day.

So I don't really know what happened to the flight, but the same flight
number is now departing this evening. Fortunately I didn't have a huge
amount to do today in Brisbane (but I have no idea what Nick had intended to
do today). I currently estimate I'll get into Brisbane at around 11:30pm
tonight.

I've got plenty of reading I was planning on doing on the flight, which I
didn't do any of, so I can keep myself occupied. I'm also going to try and
catch up with Rowan and Kelly. Oh, and it was good to be able to have a
shower. It sure beats sitting around in Auckland International all day.

I think this is the first time I've had a delay like this. The moral of the
story? Direct flights, hang the expense!

Wednesday, 12 March 2008

I'm getting on a flight to Brisbane, via Auckland, shortly. My mate Nick
(yes, that
one), is remarrying, and asked me to his Best Man, and I could hardly
say no, given he was my Best Man (and we've been friends for years)

So I'm flying out of SFO tonight, arriving in Brisbane on Friday morning,
going to the wedding on Saturday, and flying home on Sunday morning.
Fortunately with the time difference, I'll arrive on Sunday, so I get to
walk around like the living dead for a day, and then go back to work.

Yep, I'm a sucker for punishment.

I've never been Best Man before, so I'm nervous. My speech is pretty short
and sweet. Fortunately someone else is being Master of Ceremonies.

Disclaimer: I may well be an ignoramus with respect to the release schedule
for Firefox 3 with respect to the release schedule of Hardy.

It grabs me as breathtakingly stupid to be shipping a Long Term Release of
Ubuntu with a pre-release version of Firefox. I can't see how anyone can
think this is a good idea.

That said, I remember a thread on ubuntu-devel, where someone was shot down
for complaining about a release candidate of the Gimp shipping with Gutsy,
so there's certainly a precedent for shipping stable versions of Ubuntu with
non-released versions of software. I still think it's sloppy. "Bleeding
edge" and "stable release" should be mutually exclusive, yet it seems
they're not.

Monday, 03 March 2008

I first heard about Jon Oxer's home automation setup when he visited Google
last year to give a tech
talk (heh, that's right, I introduced him).

After reading this latest
article on his house, I've come to realise that he's implementing pretty
much every cool thing I wanted to do when I get around to building the
"dream house" (except I'm not too keen to go microchipping myself).

The main difference is Jon's actually electronically inclined, whereas I
have all the ideas, but lack the ability to go hack them together myself.

Anyway, having looked at the /etc/cron.daily/apt script that ships
with Ubuntu's apt package, I fail to see how the changes to
ubuntu-keyring address bug 192074. The net_update()
function of apt-key is still going to spit out stuff.

Oh wait, I see. The cron job will still spit out output when it actually
decides that something should have been done. The presence of
/var/lib/apt/keyrings/ubuntu-archive-keyring.gpg will mean the
stat call will return a valid mtime, so more often than not,
because the mtime is unchanged, the cron job won't feel the need to actually
do anything that produces output. I guess it's reasonable to produce output
on the odd occasion that a key update actually occurs. Fair enough.

I'm not sure I'd be using mtimes to make the decision though. I'd be more
inclined to use the MD5 checksum of the files, but that's just me.

So guess I've now had less of a casual inspection, and understand what the
change was trying to achieve. It just failed miserably by not ensuring the
directory existed. Oh well, patch supplied.

So I started an Ubuntu category in my blog a while ago, the intention being
to document the trials and tribulations of trying to derive (and I use the
term loosely) another
distro.

The hope has been to get it added to Planet Ubuntu's feed, where I'd like to
engage in some discourse with the Ubuntu development community, and perhaps
challenge some of aspects of how they do things.

I'm not feeding it to Planet Debian,
since me blathering on about Ubuntu's foibles is probably not of interest to
that audience.